Identifying Customer Needs for a Master's Degree Program in Industrial Engineering: A Case Study from Prospective Students’ Insights

Abstract

Customer satisfaction has become a key factor in strategic work of many institutions towards the increasing competition regarding student recruitment. This paper presents a systematic approach to identify customer needs for a Master's Degree Program in Industrial Engineering based on target students’ needs in the view of new product development. The approach consists of two methods: Choice-based conjoint analysis and Kano's Model. Conjoint analysis is used to explore important scores of each attribute of the program, i.e., specialist concentration, teaching period, research type, program language, teaching format, and tuition fee. Also, the popularity of levels in each attribute are identified. Results from conjoint analysis indicate that the most preferred master curriculum is a program of Business Data Analytics concentration, English language, full-time, hybrid of online and onsite, independence study research type, and tuition fees of 63,500 Baht. Other attributes such as interdisciplinary, joint program, work experience requirement and group (with presence/absence option) are analyzed by Kano's model to identify their category. This research contributes in the literature as a pioneer in applying these two methods to gain customer perception insights about new Master's curriculum development for education industry.